Chapter 21

Hart

I’m not proud of what happened in my office three hours ago.

I’m an idiot.

Still repeating the same mistakes over and over. I’ve always dealt with my avoidance issues like that: not by fucking the nearest hot woman, but by deflecting. And in Daisy’s case, the result of me blabbing too much information meant I used sex to distract.

One minute we were oversharing, the next I had to stop her questions, and we did it doggy style on my desk.

I’ll never be able to work on this thing again without remembering.

‘Fuck.’ I swipe a hand over my face. Yeah, like that’s going to wipe away the memory.

She was so hot leaning over my desk, her ass in the air. My cock stiffens just thinking about it but I can’t afford to get distracted again. Not this time.

We didn’t resolve anything. Not the important stuff anyway. The work, sure. She acquiesced to my demands. But when we started talking about the other stuff… I sensed the shift, saw it in her eyes, felt it all the way down to my frozen fucking heart.

I’m in over my head and she’s right there alongside me, drowning.

She left to go tidy herself up, and I’ve been hiding behind my desk ever since. I know we can’t leave things the way we did, but for now I take the coward’s way out by sending a text.

Business to take care of for the rest of the day.

Her response is quick and terse.

Fine.

We both know it isn’t. We need to talk.

I don’t want to. That’s what the sex was about, making sure I prevented her from asking the tough questions I didn’t want to contemplate let alone answer, and ensuring I kept my big mouth shut so I didn’t blab any more than I already had.

I hadn’t lied about taking care of business. The sooner I focus on what needs to be done, the better off I’ll be. I bring up the proposal for reconditioning the old villas on the screen. I’ve crunched some numbers, contacted the appropriate governing bodies, and laid it out in a clear, easy-to-read format.

This vacation programme is going to kick ass.

Imagining the joy of the foster kids when they first land on the island, I choke up and press the pads of my fingers to my eyes. That damn stinging must be from staring at the screen too long.

I blink several times and take a few steadying breaths. Better. But as I stare at the screen again, at the pictures of kids on Australia’s most reputable website for families wanting to foster, I’m catapulted back in time.

‘We’re going away,’ my foster mum says, packing a hamper with bread, peanut butter, chocolate-chip cookies, and tiny bottles of lemonade, treats we never have.

Deni is a good foster mum compared to my first, but she always favours her three biological kids over me: snotty-nosed twin girls a year older than me and a boy, the eldest by two years. I never understood why she fostered me three years ago. Bringing a ten-year-old into an already struggling family seems dumb to me. I guess she did it for the government money.

‘Where are we going?’ I ask, unable to tamp down my excitement.

She stares at me with incredulity, like she cadn’t believe I could ask such a stupid question. ‘We’re going to Coffs Harbour. You’re staying here.’

My stomach roils and the rotten apple I ate for lunch threatens to launch up into my throat and out. She’s taking her precious kids on vacation and leaving me behind. I shouldn’t be surprised. Yet another disappointment in a long line. But for once I thought I might be welcome here. I might even be liked.

‘My sister from Cairns has rented a house for us,’ Deni says. ‘I haven’t seen her in a decade and there’s only room for four of us.’

‘That’s okay,’ I say, embarrassed my voice breaks. It has to be the onset of early puberty and nothing to do with the sadness making me want to bawl. ‘I can take care of myself.’

‘Actually, you can’t,’ she says, her furtive glance away alerting me that if I didn’t like the news about their impending trip, I’ll like what she’s about to say even less. ‘You can’t stay alone so you’ll be moved on.’

Moved on…

I know what that means. I’ll be sent back into the government home until they find me another placement with another deadbeat mother with another host of problems.

I glance at the computer screen on the desk in the corner of the kitchen. She’s obviously been doing an online search for Coffs Harbour and the images on the screen feature palm trees, white sand, and a blue ocean that looks digitally enhanced.

I’ve never had a vacation, and at that moment I yearn to go so badly I ache, like that time I had the flu.

‘You’re a good kid, Hart, you’ll be fine,’ she says, sounding gruff as she turns away to finish packing the hamper.

‘No, I’m not!’ I yell, punching the hamper so that it topples and lands upside down on the floor. ‘I’m bad and that’s why you’re sending me back.’

I stomp on the loaf of bread on the floor, flattening it, as she stares at me with pity. ‘I hate you!’

I push through the back door and slam it so hard the glass pane beside it cracks. I seethe until I reach my go-to place, a bicycle shed at the farthest corner of the stupid high school I just started at, where I sit in the deserted shed and cry.

I blink several times and lift my fingers to my cheeks, shocked to find them damp. I’ve dealt with my past and moved on a long time ago, but it catches up with me at the oddest of moments.

Pa made up for lost time when he found me. I tried to feign disinterest in vacations but he took me to Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Mumbai in our first year together, then London, Dubai, and Paris the next. Despite pretending nothing impressed me, I lapped up every fact I learned in each new city and when I wasn’t able to hide my interest he showed me more.

Once I started to trust him a little, I opened myself up to learning more about his world and it seemed natural to follow in his footsteps when I finished school. Doing a business degree was his idea, as was my part-time job in the flagship hotel in Brisbane. I did everything from concierge duties to valet parking, getting a feel for how a hotel ran from the ground up.

When I did an internship in the hotel’s business centre while completing my degree, Pa was the happiest I’d ever seen him. It made what I had to do all the harder because I knew even then that I couldn’t be the man he wanted me to be. Being stuck behind a desk, ordering people around, delegating the shitty jobs I didn’t want to do myself, I would hate every minute of it.

I knew what I wanted to do. Work behind the scenes, helping kids like me reach their potential despite the hardships they faced along the way.

But I continued to toe the company line until I became so miserable Pa demanded I tell him what the hell was going on. I told him the truth; I owed him that much. The kicker was, he understood, and he invented the hotel quality control job so I could travel while ostensibly still carrying on the Rochester name in the business.

He gave me his blessing to follow my dream.

‘Damn it.’ I thump the desk and the penholder tips, spilling its contents onto the floor. There’s a framed photo of Pa and me next to it, taken on my first visit to Gem Island. I’m a gangly sixteen-year-old, uncertain and glum, Pa has his arm around me, pride in his grin.

I’ll never understand how he accepted me so unreservedly, welcoming me into his life and his heart.

That’s what my vacation project for foster kids is all about. Giving them the kind of awe-inspiring experience that I had the first time I set foot on this island.

I want them to feel welcome and valued and warm for one week in their lives, something to hold onto when times get tough, something to remember.

I ignore the pens and return my attention to the computer screen. I refuse to be the face of this campaign and I’m launching this programme, with Daisy’s help.

And once she’s done, our liaison will be over.

Simple.

At least, it should be. So why does the thought of never seeing her again make me want to smash something?